Following the magical principle of polarity to wing myself toward what I really want to write about, in the title for this post I’ve done something quite un-Nihonteki, un-Japanese — un-Shinto, in fact. Japan’s native spirituality focuses on harmony between human and spiritual realms, a harmony which finds a powerful objective expression in the natural world. “Seek Spirit? Look around!” Yet I used boku, I wrote “I” — as if “I” could possessShinto, as if it were a thingamong other things that a person could own or control or claim. The i returns to its proper size in balanced relationship. An outsized I is part of the challenge the West currently faces, as well as each of us individually. Be yourself, we’re told. What the hell does that mean, anyway? Still too much. (Too much is not enough, says the lower-case zen master/fool in my ear.)

Sometimes I just need to back into it, the destination that feels nearby, though I can’t see it. “Returning is the motion of the Tao” (chapter 40). Because if I try it head-on, all the old defenses go up like a bad reflex. An old i holds on even as a new one moves in. They spar a little. But what are wood and water doing while I stare at an i?

“who are you, little i” asks e. e. cummings in a poem of that title, “(five or six years old)/peering from some high/ window; at the gold/of november sunset” — let’s make it May instead: we can, and e. e. won’t mind. Will cheer us on, I suspect — “(and feeling: that if day/has to become night/this is a beautiful way)”

Participate in our own becoming. A call, if we choose to hear and heed it. Make it day when it’s night (for our next trick, do it without using electricity). Or vice versa, turning off the glare of the spotlight on the self which isn’t the whole story.

After all, “five or six years old” is about right: didn’t that crazy Galilean say we need to become like little children again? Is that“being yourself”?

Like is important: we can all imagine it, approach it, approximate it. Journey towards it. Try out “yes” till it drops the ” ” — that little chicken scratch that distracts us from so much. Or become the chicken that makes the scratch. That’s a power we’re granted, too. Shape-shift at will and need. One thing becomes another, in the Mother, in the Mother. Thanks, Mom. Can faking it make it real? Well, the pressure’s off if all I need to do is fakeit.

(e. e., you saw it, said it elsewhere: “i thank You God for most this amazing/day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees/and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything/which is natural which is infinite which is yes”). And if “You God” doesn’t work for you, insert your own addressee of choice.

Need a spell to make it happen? “Power of choice I grant thee, I grant thee, I grant thee.” O.K., proceed.

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Entrance, Tsubaki Grand Shrine, Washington state

Site stats show that my previous posts on Shinto are among the most popular here at A Druid Way. The reason for that can’t be too far to find. We crave like a food-hunger a spiritual reality that does not depend on belief(or at least not on belief alone), but is present to us whenever we’re present to it — and even when we’re not. We may hunger for a Way or Ways, just like we yearn for dark chocolate or hot sauce or beef or fresh limes in guacamole (insert yourfavorite food hunger here), a harmony that we can begin to fall back into at any moment, wherever we are, just by shifting our attention, and restore a sense of balance and integrity. And not just a sense of them, but its reality — a poise for living that shows in our words and deeds. We’ve all known this harmony, witnessed it in others, however briefly, which is why we can feel so disheartened when we lack it, when we’ve lost it, fallen out of it. We know it’s possible because it’s there, in living memory, however far we stand from it right now, in this grubby, muddy present moment.

We’ve even got a Shinto shrine in the U.S., the Tsubaki Grand Shrine in Washington State, if we need the reminder. Which is what a shrine, among other things, persistently tries to be. It’s here, all around us, what we seek. And a few among us imported Shinto as a recognition of that consciousness, as a support for us when we lose our way. From it we can jump-start our own (there’s a possessive pronoun again) American Shinto, if we desire it, if we give it space to manifest. The kamiknow and dwell in America, too.

Though it’s not a perfect instrument, a song, a painting, a poem can remind us, point us in directions that can restore and heal. “The Spirit,” says Mary Oliver in her simply-titled “Poem,”

likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body's world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is--
so it enters us--
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

see shrines as both restful places filled with a sense of the sacred, and as the source of their spiritual vitality – they regard them as their spiritual home, and often attend the same shrine regularly throughout their lives. Shrines need not be buildings – rocks, trees, and mountains can all act as shrines, if they are special to kami.

Physical world as spiritual home: what a change that would make in us if we carried that knowing with us all day long.

A large shrine can contain several smaller sub-shrines. Shinto shrines can cover several thousand acres, or a few square feet. They are often located in the landscape in such a way as to emphasise their connection to the natural world, and can include sacred groves of trees, and streams.

How many of us find the kami in a garden, a window pot we lovingly water, a bird feeder stocked through winter, or whatever season in your area that otherwise challenges the small feathered lives around us?

Tsubaki Grand Shrine ritual

Various symbolic structures, such as torii gates and shimenawa ropes, are used to separate the shrine from the rest of the world.

Separation as a reminder— not that one exists like some line in the sand, but one we need, in order to notice what’s right in front of our noses.

And so I remember to bow at the willow at the bottom of the hill where our house sits. I talk to the crocuses. Sometimes I forget. Then I remember again. Muslim mystics chant the dhikr, literally the “Remembrance” of that one Name ringing just behind our day-to-day awareness. Or many names, each waiting to be cherished, each a kami, each a potential doorway to what we seek. In a world of seven billion persons, a grand synthesis, a God for everyone, may not be feasible at this point in our consciousness. But we can reverence that lopsided pine down at the corner, honor the robins and starlings on our lawn, respect our own bodies on this earth, and begin, again, to find our ways. Isn’t that much of the promise of spring (and of so many of our human stories) — starting over? The growing shout of green, the rising sap, birdsong and peepers calling into the night, what we call spring fever in our veins and nerves and sinews, obeying an old law we’ve almost forgotten.

In answer to a query about the viability of some form of American Shinto, about “What is Shinto to the West,” a Westerner observes,

Well, Shinto in the West is automatically different from Shinto in Japan. For some reason, Japanese immigrants and their descendents don’t seem to keep practicing Shinto very much, perhaps because of the difficulty in practicing a shrine-centered, community-oriented faith in a place with nearly no shrines (I can count the ones I know of on one hand!) and a very small and scattered community.

So, most of the North American practitioners I know of are of European ancestry, trying to practice Shinto alone and without shrines, and learning what they know from books. Many have some sort of cultural connection to Japan – either they’ve studied it academically like you, or else they have married a Japanese person, or they lived part of their life there, or have learned a bit about Japanese spirituality through the martial arts community. We have to adapt the religion to our new environment, e.g. finding replacements for unavailable supplies, translating prayers from Old Japanese into English, and trying to answer hard questions like, should we honour the spirits of Japan or try to identify the spirits of our own environment?

Druids have built their own shrines, and begun to listen to the spirits here on the North American continent, which differ from European or Asian ones. Just the act of listening opens many doors. What we often lack is the support of a community in our practice. Many have the strength of self-discipline to sustain a solitary practice, but others need the interaction, inspiration and community spirit that can help through the arid periods where nothing seems to be happening and we’re stopped dead in the water.

For that reason alone many Americans stick with Christianity or Judaism, because it offers that support, even if they also seek out other founts of spiritual nourishment in places their Abrahamic fellow-religionists might balk at. It’s the reason behind “spiritual but not religious,” which ultimately is often hard to pull off in practical terms, because spirit seeks a form, a practice, if only to come true to us, to enter our physical lives in manifest ways, as Oliver’s poem above reminds us. We do this and not that because it works. Any claims about earlier or better or more spiritual or, Goddess help us all, divinely inspired and uniquely true forever and always, come along after.

2 responses to “Boku no Shinto: My Shinto, Part 1”

Interesting post, there being plenty of useful parallels between Druidry and Taoism I would think, especially in the realm of the cyclicality of life.
Perhaps, also, many Americans choose not only to path of extensive community but also a path of black/white certainty rather than relativism? It’s always more difficult to be forced to think, after all!

Hi Max, thanks for visiting and commenting. I agree that certainty can be awfully comforting, especially when so much else is breaking loose around us in times like these. But then, we choose, as you say, what we need, and then after the fact set up beliefs about our choice to conceal that we chose it in the first place, rather than it being the Sole Eternal Truth of the Universe that reached out to us. We’re able to become what we dream of, but out of fear we turn around and keep abdicating the power to achieve it.